The record-breaking total has lottery players dreaming bigger than ever.

If you are going to write a story about a gargantuan lottery jackpot, you might as well go to Lump's, the corner delicatessen in Bethlehem where the owner, Lump, dispenses gobs of good luck with his egg sandwiches and potato salad.

Seven years ago, Lump — aka Dave Sanders — sold a $1 million lottery ticket to a woman named Donna Goeppert. Five months later, he sold her another one. That story made the national news and cemented Lump's reputation as the place to go for lucky numbers, and for stories about lucky numbers.

It helps that Lump is a genial and chatty man who loves to talk lotteries.

"It's just outstanding," he said Thursday morning, during a lull in selling tickets for Friday night's record lottery prize, the $540 million Mega Millions jackpot.

Yup — $540 million. A little more than half-a-billion-with-a-b. Enough money to pay for the downtown Allentown redevelopment single-handed and make an everlasting friend of Mayor Ed Pawlowski.

It's actually the annuity amount, meaning the value if you chose to have your winnings spread out in 26 annual payments. If you take the lump sum, the jackpot is $389 million, before taxes.

The drawing for the lottery, which is played in 42 states, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the District of Columbia, takes place in Georgia at 11 p.m. The winner is selected from five numbered balls drawn from a set of 56 and a single "Megaball" drawn from a set of 46.

"It makes people's dreams come true," said Lump, an avid evangelist for the Pennsylvania Lottery who keeps a statue of Gus the Groundhog on the counter of his 901 Center St. store even though that spokesmarmot — the second most famous groundhog in Pennsylvania — was retired some months ago.

People like to rub their tickets on Gus — and his girlfriend, Gabby — for luck. And it's all about luck, this lottery business. You can pick your own numbers or have a computer pick them for you, but no system in the world will make the right numbers come up.

Even Lump, despite his remarkable track record of selling winners, admits that.

"The lady who bought $500 worth of tickets, her odds are the same as the guy who bought one,"w he said.

He had both in his deli during the morning — a man who bought a single $1 ticket ("That's all I need") and a woman who bought 500 of them. Lump said the woman is a regular who lives comfortably off the money her husband left to her and spends her Social Security check on the lottery.

"When it comes to the lottery, there's no economy problem," Lump said.

Other patrons included a city worker, a tired woman who had just come off the third shift at a New Jersey drug company and a man named Stanley Ramsberger. He is an old friend of Lump's and won $10,000 on a ticket he bought from the deli last year.

"He came in when his wife was supposed to come in, so he won it," Lump said.

"And she spent it," Ramsberger said.

He bought a few tickets from some other games and then a couple of Mega Millions tickets.

He let the computer pick his numbers.

"It confuses me to pick them," he said.

Elliott Reiss came in after that. He is a 30-year-old insurance salesman who has a precise idea of what to do with a big jackpot: move to Myrtle Beach, S.C., and live on the water.

"I'm a pretty simple guy," he said, buying 50 tickets for himself and a co-worker. "I've been going there since I was 8 years old and I want to make the move."

The odds, of course, are stacked against him, and the rest of us, to the point of inanity. Odds of hitting all six numbers: 1 in 176 million. You have far better odds of being hit by lightning in a given year — 1 in 775,000, according to the National Weather Service.

But that's never been the point of the lottery. The point is dreaming about fabulous wealth — the kind of wealth that puts you in a seaside palace in Myrtle Beach, living a Jimmy Buffet life of margaritas and sunsets.

Or, for that matter, the kind of wealth that lets you retire from the deli business. Lottery dealers who sell the winning ticket get a portion of the pot. A very hefty one, in this case.